Starring: Ben Kingsley, Barbara Sukowa, Ezra Miller, Christopher Briney, Rupert Graves, Andreja Pejic, Alexander Beyer, Mark McKenna, Zachary Nachbar-Seckel, Avital Lvova
Distributor: Kismet
Runtime: 97 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2023
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps the aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
Daliland is the idiosyncratic world of Spanish artist, Salvador Dali. Dali, who died in 1989, and who might well be pleased with this cinema portrait but not pleased to realise that, with the passing of time, the 21st-century audience may not know who he is, or was. This is an opportunity to become aware of this most eccentric person, self-centred and arrogant, who achieved a great deal in the world of art, fostering his own publicity.
This film opens tantalisingly with Dali himself on a talk show, immediately recognisable with his upturned moustache, with the contestants blindfold, asking questions – to which Dali says yes to everything. He does look like Dali himself but here is Kingsley, 40 years after his Oscar for playing Gandhi, showing how versatile he can be when embodying unusual characters. It is an excellent Kingsley performance. And he is matched by Sukowa playing Gala, his wife of many decades, a Russian émigré to France, 10 years older than Dali but with him from 1929 to her death in 1982, demanding of him, protective of him, forcing him to work when he was reluctant, but with an eye to younger men whose career she promoted.
In checking with sources on Dali and his life and work, a long entry and detailed entry in Wikipedia, for instance, for quick research, many aspects of Dali’s character and behaviour described there are incorporated into the film, into Dali’s talk about himself, in the portrait and behaviour of Gala, his hypochondria, food issues, sexuality, voyeurism . . .
But, this is a dramatised portrait with fictional elements. The principal element is that of the character Jim (Briney), an earnest young man from Idaho who begins work in New York for Dali’s agent, attracts Dali’s attention, calling him St Sebastian, but not attracting Gala’s favour. As he goes to work with Dali, meant to keep an eye on him to keep in working for an immediate show, he allows himself to be seduced by this other planet as he calls it, intrigued by the parties, the flamboyant guests, sexual overtones, the New York world of the mid-1970s. We have seen Jim at the beginning of the film, in 1984, watching the Dali show on television, so this is a flashback, his experience of Dali, his genuine love of art but realising he could never be an artist, but then the victim of the whims of Dali, Gala and his agent.
In 1985, he makes a trip to Spain, to visit Dali, caught up in various schemes whereby art paper was bought, Dali signing the pages and then lithographs and prints made of the art and sold as the genuine article (also referenced in Wikipedia). He does his best to help Dali whom he admires but is ousted by Gala.
The screenplay highlights some of the past between Dali and Gala, some flashbacks with Miller as Dali and Lvova as Gala. But, at the end, Jim visits the artist whose health is in decline, to give him a book that he had compiled of the various signatures that Dali used for his work. It emerges that Jim, no longer seduced by this world, runs a small gallery, his love of art.
The screenplay was written by John Walsh and directed by his wife, Mary Harron. In looking at Harron’s filmology, she has brought her audience into some bizarre and exotic worlds, I Shot Andy Warhol, his strange New York world, especially the 1960s; The Notorious Bettie Page, a model who was investigated by the American Senate; and a film version of Bret Easton Ellis’s tale of a predatory young banker, American Psycho. She brings her intrigue with these offbeat worlds, the touches of decadence, to her interpretation of Daliland.
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